Below is the complete list of Liane Moriarty books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Nicola Berry Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Deadly Ambition Books
Publication Order of Big Little Lies Books
About Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty is an Australian novelist known for sharply observed stories about families, friendships, marriage, motherhood, social performance, and the secrets concealed beneath comfortable suburban lives. Her novels move easily between domestic drama, psychological suspense, social comedy, and mystery, often beginning with an unsettling event whose significance becomes clear through several competing perspectives. Wit and warmth remain present even when the subject involves abuse, betrayal, grief, infertility, death, or the collapse of a carefully maintained public identity.
Born in Sydney in 1966, Moriarty is the eldest of six children. She studied business and worked in advertising and marketing before becoming a freelance copywriter. Although she had written stories from childhood, she initially regarded novelists as distant figures rather than ordinary people who could build writing careers. The publication of a novel by her younger sister, Jaclyn Moriarty, encouraged her to take her own ambitions more seriously.
Moriarty enrolled in a master’s program at Macquarie University, where she wrote the manuscript that became her first adult novel, Three Wishes. The book follows adult triplet sisters whose close relationship is complicated by rivalry, private disappointment, and differing ideas about family. Its ensemble structure and interest in the contrast between public spectacle and private experience anticipated much of her later work.
Her international breakthrough came with The Husband’s Secret, built around a letter containing a devastating confession that was intended to be opened only after its writer’s death. The novel demonstrated Moriarty’s ability to connect apparently separate households through coincidence, moral responsibility, and consequences that no character can fully control. Big Little Lies brought even wider recognition through its portrayal of mothers connected by an Australian primary school, where playground politics, gossip, domestic violence, and a mysterious death gradually converge.
Moriarty rarely relies on a single dominant protagonist. She often shifts among women and men of different ages, allowing misunderstandings to accumulate because each person possesses only part of the truth. Minor incidents acquire new meaning when retold from another viewpoint, while comic observations sit beside genuine emotional danger. Her mysteries matter, but their solutions are usually less important than the changes produced by their exposure.
Later novels have continued testing families and temporary communities under pressure. Truly Madly Guilty examines the consequences of one disastrous gathering, while Nine Perfect Strangers confines a group of troubled guests inside an unconventional wellness retreat. Apples Never Fall turns the disappearance of a mother into an examination of marriage, adult siblings, competitive sport, and the different stories children tell about their parents. Here One Moment begins when an airline passenger predicts how and when fellow travellers will die, using that premise to explore mortality, anxiety, chance, and the choices people make once uncertainty appears to have been removed.
Several novels have been adapted for television, including Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, Apples Never Fall, and The Last Anniversary. These adaptations expanded her international audience, but her fiction remains strongly Australian in setting and social texture. Sydney, coastal communities, suburban schools, family homes, cafés, and holiday destinations become enclosed environments where familiarity encourages both intimacy and judgment.
Moriarty has also written the Nicola Berry children’s series, published in some markets under the Space Brigade name. Her first adult sequel, Big Little Truths, returns to the women and families of Big Little Lies more than a decade after the original story.
Her bibliography is best approached primarily as a collection of standalones rather than a single continuing universe. What connects the novels is Moriarty’s ability to expose the instability beneath ordinary life: the private resentment behind a friendly conversation, the history contained within a marriage, and the moment when one concealed truth changes how an entire family understands itself.